The successful trader is the one who codifies, the one who turns things into rules. Every idea that’s market-worthy must then be tested.”

C&D’s trading inspired a great deal of mystification, but in reality they were a mass merchandiser who sold 90 percent of their products as loss leaders so they could make a gigantic profit on the remaining 10 percent. Sometimes they had to wait a long time for good things to happen. Most people can’t psychologically handle the wait.

That is not to say losses are easy to accept, but Dennis and Eckhardt taught the Turtles not to consider their trading in terms of amounts of money. They wanted them to think of money as a variable, because in that way, regardless of account size, they could make the correct trading decisions at all times.

Instead of introducing the course with a lecture on making money, he was laying the foundation for what the students had to do when they lost money.

Eckhardt was saying that, as with anything in life, most people know what the right thing to do is but fail to do it. Trading is no different.

Disassociating the dollars from the trading was a huge part of what was instilled in the Turtles.

Tom R. Willis, the son of Tom Willis and close enough to Dennis to consider him an uncle, said that Dennis simply had a sense of proportion that was different from the rest of the world’s: “When he perceived that he had an edge, he would go all into a position with mammoth trading size.”

Still, the biggest problem with a story like this is that most people don’t want to actually understand how the real pros make big money. They want the road to riches to be effortless.

Turtles had to be able to answer these questions at all times: What is the state of the market? What is the volatility of the market? What is the equity being traded? What is the system or the trading orientation? What is the risk aversion of the trader or client?